Joint Task Force 2
In 1992, Deputy Minister of Defence Robert Fowler announced he was recommending to Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn that he disband the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) and create a new military counter-terrorism group.
[8] They were given the SERT facility on Dwyer Hill Road near Ottawa as their own base of operations, and permanently parked a Greyhound bus and a DC-9 aircraft on the grounds for use in training.
[8] The federal budget of December 2001 allocated approximately $120 million over six years to expand unit capabilities and double its size to an estimated 600 personnel, as part of the overall plan following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
[8] They were scheduled to free approximately 55 hostages in Operation Freedom 55, but the mission was cancelled as the Bosnian Serbs released all the prisoners voluntarily.
[8] In 1996, JTF 2 deployed to Haiti to advise the security forces of President René Préval on methods to repel the revolutionary army, train local SWAT teams and raid weapons smugglers in Port-au-Prince.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the American declaration of a War on Terror, approximately 40 JTF 2 soldiers were sent to southern Afghanistan in early December 2001 to be part of Task Force K-Bar, under the command of Captain Robert Harward.
However, in Sean M. Maloney's book Enduring the Freedom, it was reported that JTF 2 was secretly deployed without Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's permission in early October 2001.
[17] Several months later, The Globe and Mail published an image on its front page showing operators in distinctive forest-green Canadian Forces combat uniforms delivering captured prisoners to the Americans.
In January 2002, JTF 2 deployed reconnaissance teams to the series of caves discovered in Zhawar Kili, just south of Tora Bora.
A platoon from SEAL Team 3, including several of their Desert Patrol Vehicles, accompanied by a German Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK) element and a Norwegian SOF team, spent some nine days conducting extensive site exploitation, clearing an estimated 70 caves and 60 structures in the area, recovering a huge amount of both intelligence and munitions, but they did not encounter any al-Qaeda fighters.
[18] In 2004, an estimated 40 members of JTF 2 serving with Task Force K-Bar were awarded the Presidential Unit Citation by the U.S. government for service in Afghanistan.
"[17] On 26 November 2005, members of the terrorist group Swords of Righteousness Brigade – a small offshoot of possibly Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI), Ansar al-Islam (AAI), Army of Islam, or a cover name for their abduction cells, or freelance cash criminal abductors – kidnapped four members (two Canadian, one British, and one American) of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Baghdad, Iraq.
[28] JTF 2 has also acted as bodyguards to Canadians travelling abroad, notably accompanying Lieutenant-General Maurice Baril and Raymond Chrétien to Zaire in November 1996.
[32] In May 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Ukraine to show solidarity and to witness the war for himself, alongside members of the cabinet.
